We’ve officially entered 2015, after a turbulent 2014 filled with challenges and surprises. For some, 2014 might have been a fruitful year, while for others it was definitely a time of hardship. Nonetheless, for those who have been struggling over the last year, I’d suggest we all sing along to the Disney smash hit “Let It Go”, then look on the brighter side and start afresh in 2015.
The beginning of the year is the time for New Year’s resolutions, for both individuals and organisations. For an organisation, it is a critical time to work on formulating a new strategy or revitalising some of the old ones. Before writing this article, I was thinking about several topics, trying to find the best one to begin the year. Eventually I settled on the one thing — and probably the most important one — essential to get yourself and your organisation healthy and ready for the new year (and possibly beyond): an organisational check-up.
The reason why an organisational health check-up is vital is because organisations are a lot like people. Both have vital signs that can be easily read, like blood pressure. Both can be good one day and feel poorly in the next.
People often ignore or overlook the benefit of having health check-ups when they feel fine, but sooner or later they might discover that they are not as healthy as they initially thought. Likewise, just because your company is performing well does not necessarily mean that there aren’t some unhealthy symptoms somewhere.
An organisational health check-up or diagnosis is the process of identifying symptoms, then tracing them back to the underlying problems. It is an effective way of looking at an organisation to determine gaps between the current performance and the expected outcome.
In other words, when you are feeling sick and you don’t know why, you go and see a doctor to seek his or her advice. He or she will identify your symptoms and examine the underlying causes to be able to provide the right treatment and prescribe suitable medicine.
So basically, how do you diagnose a sick organisation? Does it work the same way as with humans?
First, you need to identify your organisational vital signs — financial results, revenues and profits, cash flow and balance sheets as well as staff turnover rates, to name just a few.
Let’s imagine this: If you company’s cash flow is erratic or your balance sheet is overloaded with debts and you can’t seem to pay them off, let alone your employees’ salaries, it indicates that your company is getting sick.
Moreover, when the turnover rate is high, you risk losing talents who are vital in driving your business. As more of them leave, your company stagnates, and then you know it is sick.
The next step, however, is even more critical. When it comes to human health, you can do the basics by noticing any changes happening to your body, but you can’t do a proper health check-up when things get complicated (unless you’re a doctor) because if you misdiagnose the problem, it’s unlikely that you will find the right cure. Companies are no different in this regard.
However, it can be extremely challenging for leaders or managers to notice if there’s any change happening in their organisation, anything broken or out of order, on a daily basis. This is because they are too familiar with conditions or may be biased toward believing everything is still “normal”. Thus, I’d say that sometimes it’s beneficial to have the holistic perspective of an outside third party or specialist to help identify certain issues.
Most organisations today face increasing stakeholder expectations but have fewer resources to work with, so every decision in terms of strategic planning is crucial, and cost-cutting programmes will keep running their course. That is why managers and leaders need to rely on fact-based decision-making, using diagnostic information or research instead of relying on experience, intuition or gut feeling. For this reason, if you have your organisation’s health checked annually, you will have scientific analytics on your overall performance; hence, you can better prepare your organisation now that you know your strengths and weaknesses.
Getting and staying healthy is the most wonderful wish anyone could ever ask for, and yes I’m referring to both for people and for organisations. Thus, in this new year, make sure you have your organisation’s health checked so you can be ready for 2015 and beyond. As the old saying goes, “Prevention is better than cure.”
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Arinya Talerngsri is Group Managing Director at APMGroup, Thailand’s leading Organisational and People Development Consultancy. For more information, write an e-mail to arinya_t@apm.co.th or visit www.apm.co.th